Application Development Paper

The first and possibly the most important part of developing an application is to ensure that it solves a problem, or serves a purpose. By doing this as a developer, you have to actually analyze the problem or depending on the type of app, the business process it will be affecting.  You can do this by conducting an analysis to discover the important concepts that pertain to the problem. When this type of analysis is completed, it helps you to understand and describe the actual problem. During the analyzing process you will need to define the boundaries of the problem domain to be able to accurately define what the application will do. By the end of the analysis phase, your requirements will have all been specified and documented.

After your analysis, you will begin a setup process of the development environment. During this phase you will need to plan a new SAS library, considering a few things in the course of these steps. SAS is an integrated system of software solutions that enables you to perform several tasks including: data entry, retrieval and management, report writing and graphics design, statistical and mathematical analysis, operations research and project management, and of course applications development. These files are all stored in the same folder or directory on your computer. One additional step often needed during this stage is the licensing of the SAS software products that were used. You need to ensure that the end users license and all the software products that they will need to run your application.

The next step will be the design and development of components. This is the object-oriented design phase of the development life cycle, and its main focus is on the work of the component developers. Within this job you are able to define how the elements of the application will work. Once the components are completely designed and developed, as a designer, my next step would be the development of the actual application, through the use of the objects that were created by the component developers. There are many options for modeling tools and flow chart techniques that you can use to determine how many windows will be needed for your application, along with how the user should interact with each window and how the windows should be connected to one another. After determining the number of windows that are needed, you must consider the tasks that the user will need to perform in a window. Once you have determined that, you need to build a frame that allows a user to complete tasks.

Now that you have your frames and components developed, you need to add communication between them. The design of your application will determine that the components on a frame, or in some cases if the frames need to work with each other. A couple examples being that you would like a graphic object to display a certain photo when it is selected by the user from a list of choices, or maybe you’re wanting the user to open another frame when a push button is selected. In instances like these, you are able to add component and frame communication either by using SAS Component Language (SCL) programs or by using some of the features that are contained within components that you have built through the use of the SAS Component Object Model architecture

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